Finally realized that headphones are the way for this album. A total epic journey into space! Just trying to get a handle on all the strange sounds is a passtime in itself. I hear something new each time. I hear brief passages of ambient weirdness that are as (or more) mind-blowingly intricate and delightfully expressive than anything that has been achieved by ambient/electro arists in the intervening years.

Randy Newman - Harps and Angels (a return to form like his 'Good Old Boys' period; am very jazzed that he will be performing in SF this fall)Milieu & Quosp - Grassland Melodies (very nice split netrelease in an ambient vein that fell under my radar)

Nice one, Forrest. I hadn't heard about this (free netlabel) release, and as I discovered Quosp last year when reviewing a bunch of releases on u-cover, I'm happy to find more. Milieu has had more than his fair share of exposure, but Quosp deserves to be more widely known. So here's what a certain person wrote about his u-cover release at the beginning of the year:

"Quosp is the chosen moniker of callow Colin Kay, and his Soundscapes I is a precocious set of ambient celestiality replete with enough dream device to put stars on your lid. The disc assembles selections from previous digi-EPs together with four previously unreleased tracks. In places it patches into the synth-mediated sub-orchestrality of Eno’s more harmonically resolved ambient pieces. In fact, parts sound more like the drawers of the later appropriators of the legacy of Blessed Brian’s spatial ambient being rummaged through. The beauteous “Bistre”, for example, could be a more mellifluous Milieu meeting a less careworn Basinski channeling one of Aphex’s sweeter SAWs. A thrumming fog of stringswell streams through the shadowier “Blue”, resembling more up-to-date post-orchestral touchstones, Celer, colluding with Prince of Kompakt Pop Ambient, Markus Guentner. “Beechwood”, meanwhile, is steeped in the same spirit of slowcore sacral minimalism by now the referential preserve of Stars of the Lid, while “Aqua” and “Night Coast” hover around a Discreet Music zone at the edges of Another Green World. A wholly successful assemblage."(from http://www.ei-mag.com/profile0014.php)